Читать книгу Staging Ground - Leslie Stainton - Страница 18

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“WHAT HAS THE NORTH TO DO WITH SLAVERY?”: 1852–1861

We ask two things of the structures we erect: that they shelter us and that they communicate “whatever we find important and need to be reminded of,” writes John Ruskin. Christopher Hager’s town hall did both. Its soaring lines and airy façade spoke of the civilized society to which Lancastrians aspired. Enter, the building’s exterior seemed to suggest, and behold your better self. Its interior spoke of darker matters.

Two days after the grand opening of Fulton Hall, the first ad for a show in the new space appeared in the Lancaster press: Kendall and Dickinson’s Ethiopian Minstrels, a band of white “serenaders” particularly admired for their “delineation of negro character.” Banjo, tambourine, fiddle, bones—the simulated sounds of plantation life in the American South—soon filled Lancaster’s new town hall. Songs about darkies in the kitchen and slaves on the block, the poor nigger’s fate is hard, the white man’s heart is stone: even a building as fine as Hager’s could not muffle the beast that stalked American life in 1852.

The passage by Congress, two years earlier, of the Fugitive Slave Law—under which every U.S. citizen, regardless of personal belief or religion, could be forced to participate in the capture of blacks fleeing slavery—had plunged Northerners into a moral swamp. “If our resistance to this law is not right, there is no right,” cried Ralph Waldo Emerson. His neighbor Bronson Alcott asked, “What has the North to do with slavery?” The answer was clear: everything.

Hager’s hall was itself complicit. Despite passage of a gradual abolition act in 1780, the state of Pennsylvania had continued to cooperate with Southerners seeking the return of their “property” until well into the nineteenth century, and freedom-seeking slaves who crossed the Maryland border into Lancaster County were routinely incarcerated in the jail whose walls would become the foundation of Fulton Hall. “Negro” Isaac; “Negress” Phillis; Jacob Bott, “a runaway from Baltimore”; Venus Levan, daughter of Lidy Profit, “woman of Color,” and servant of Thomas Neal; William Toogood (alias Abram Boston), “colored man”; James Craten, “negro,” and who knows how many other enslaved people from the American South spent days, weeks, sometimes months locked inside Lancaster’s prison while bounty hunters and slaveholders compiled and submitted the legal documents necessary to remove them from the state and return them to bondage—or abolitionists tried through judicial means to free them.

Meanwhile, men like Christopher Hager, who ran cotton mills and whose banks invested in them, supported the industry that kept African Americans in chains. When Hager and other city leaders opened Lancaster’s first cotton factory in 1847, even Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—who voted against the Fugitive Slave Law and defended Pennsylvanians who violated it—endorsed the enterprise, for the mills meant jobs and prosperity in a town struggling to move from an artisan to a factory economy.

So Fulton Hall was built, at least in part, with cotton money, and in his opening-night address, Judge Alexander Hayes paid tribute to the mills that had brought “new life and activity into our own too quiet city” and helped spur a building boom. Witness the new gasworks, new jail, new churches, two new cotton mills, and a thousand new homes that had gone up in just the previous year, Hayes said. Construction was also under way on a new courthouse, designed by Samuel Sloan, who in the summer of 1852 helped lay the building’s cornerstone. Into it went a Bible, an almanac, and a copy of President Millard Fillmore’s message to Congress endorsing the Compromise of 1850—which included the Fugitive Slave Law.

While the new courthouse was going up, trials and hearings took place in Fulton Hall. For a time, as well, the congregation of a local church used the space for Sunday worship—the first of many times the hall would host Christian gatherings. Newly established Franklin and Marshall College held its first commencement ceremonies inside the Fulton in June 1853, with trustee James Buchanan presiding over the event. A “great desideratum,” as more than one paper called Fulton Hall, had indeed been supplied. Soon Hager would turn the building over to a citizens’ association, thereby fulfilling his pledge to create a truly public hall for the town he loved.

By night, the structure was the setting for concerts, panoramas, lectures, stock theatrical companies, an automaton band, bell ringers, and magicians. Next door, Colonel Frank Reigart set up a patent office where he sold, among much else, an engraving of Fulton Hall; to the north of the hall, Hager opened a hotel and bar. A few doors away, the Fulton Opera House Confectionary offered cakes and candies, and the Fulton Family Grocery sold food and other goods. Clothiers tapped the marketing power of the new facility: “The Philharmonic Concert at Fulton Hall was noted for the number of pretty women present, many of whom had adorned their persons with those beautiful shawls sold by Fahnestock,” read an ad in the Saturday Express. “These shawls have a magical effect upon the purse strings of husbands and fathers.”

In early 1854, workmen installed a seven-foot statue of Robert Fulton in a niche above the main entrance to the hall. Philadelphia sculptor Hugh Cannon had rendered the Lancaster native in cedar, the traditional material for ship figureheads, and Fulton—who had tinkered with submarines and torpedoes in the Seine and made history launching the first commercial steamboat on American waters—seemed poised to chart a journey aboard the building that carried his name. He looked east, toward the rising sun, one hand on his breast. Cannon had bolted planks of wood together to form Fulton’s body and head, and although you couldn’t see it from the street, he’d gone to the trouble of cross-hatching Fulton’s trousers and drilling buttonholes into his cape. This Robert Fulton was all swagger and brio, an emblem of American drive. When a workman trying to install the sculpture griped to Hager that he couldn’t get along with his temperamental foreman, Hager joked that they should petrify the foreman instead and put him above the door—but it was the visionary Fulton Hager wanted, a man contemporaries praised for his “calm constancy, his industry, and that indefatigable patience and perseverance, which always enabled him to overcome difficulties.”

The same week that Fulton’s statue was unveiled, Uncle Tom’s Cabin played Fulton Hall for the very first time. For twenty-five cents, you could take in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “great moral lesson,” and audiences did, in droves. This particular production, by George Aiken, had attracted huge crowds in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, but dozens of other productions had begun touring American playhouses, and their numbers would soar. Aiken’s play introduced the notion of single-feature entertainment as well as the matinee—launched in the 1850s to accommodate women and children.

When the first Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened in New York in September 1852, New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett assailed its “extravagant exhibitions of the imaginary horrors of Southern slavery.” Bennett advised that the play be shut down “at once and forever. The thing is in bad taste . . . and is calculated, if persisted in, to become a firebrand of the most dangerous character to the peace of the whole country.” But productions flourished, and the abolition movement surged—and with it opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. Thousands who had shunned the theater as a coffer of sin, many of them working-class Americans, swarmed to the story of the beneficent slave who suffers on earth, dies, and ascends into heaven. “Now,” declared the pacifist abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, “the Theater is openly . . . before and better than the Church.” The production prompted some theaters to begin granting admission to African Americans, who sat in their own sections.

The images were unforgettable: Simon Legree whipping Tom, Eliza escaping with her infant across the frozen Ohio River, the death of Little Eva. These became, in effect, holy pictures for a rapt nation. In New York, the show enthralled a young Henry James, who later described Tom as a “wonderful ‘leaping’ fish” that flew through the air and landed “on every stage, literally without exception, in America and Europe.” Moved by the drama, Stephen Foster composed “My Old Kentucky Home.” “Tomming” became a way of life for countless actors and a mechanism by which Americans of all persuasions probed their assumptions about race. There were pro-slavery Toms, blackface lampoons, Irish parodies that critiqued white slave labor in the North, comic burlesques with happy endings.